thee istsfor manity reader

Nothing Means Something

The victims were not drawn from the elites. The earliest surviving epistle asks: What of compassion? During the time of plague: What of abnegation?

The outsider is to blame for the epidemic… expulsion, exodus… divine agency…

The Oracle’s response was for a call of bones. Bones? Human bone. Recover the bones of Hesiod.

In the face of pestilential adversity call societies to bind together. The summer heat brings severe pestilence… prepare to honor thy gods.

The gods are called upon when a pestilence is particularly severe — a special intercession is necessary if we are completely overcome with superstitious dread. Yet the flautist is ambivalent. Pagan entertainment to appease the gods is failed invective for those that are deaf and unseeing. Syntax and meaning are useless. Nothing means something.

Consult the sybilline books and hold a thanksgiving feast. Wait… was that a cough?

“Don’t write it right, just write it—and then make it right later.”

— Tara Moss

Exiles In the Land of Kakistocracy

I.  A Conversation in the Time of Galamatias:

Our salad days are filled with bitter herbs and intractable roots —
Not so much a salad, but a melange
Of weeds and thistles —
Indelicate things in our mouths.

Every bite a mouthful of rot and offal —
Awful offal.

The kakistocracy is installed in the cupboards
The cups are off on a two week vacation in Wuhan.
We are mystified and malnourished.

Now I’ve had my wine…
And you look better than you did twenty minutes ago.

And you say:
The sky is a massive hole tonight —
My precious lucida is eating the universe:
Inside-out.

I can lay down and go to sleep.

The lights are receding
And the darkness is strangely pleasing.

II.  The Death of Tane:

Then there was the sickness —
So hot.

The vault of heaven darker —
Then darker —
A black sun —
At end.

It was succeeded by the shadow
Of the shadow —
Spreading —
Nearer and nearer to the pin prick
Of light —
Destroyed.

To the west—
distant—
A white effluent
Soft and yielding
Bounds off.

III.  Passage:

Crossing guards cane a woman.
She stopped traffic —
She wore a mask
She needed a cuddle —
She shook —
She hollered:
“You there, take this…”
Her eyes closed.

The wind appeared pink.

“Your mother buggered 
little boys and girls!”

“She’s a ghost,”
My mother said —

“Alone —”
As she squeezed my neck.

“Goodbye,” I cried.

IV.  Coulrophobia In The Land Kakistocracy:

Clowns are spotted in the Carolina gloaming —
Clowns with knives at the edges
Of dark woods.

I met an old man who loved
A woman who —
In whispers —
Had recently died.

He recounted his harrowing nights
Raising his hands at
An unfamiliar country.

Without spotting an actual person —
He spent lonely days
Encircled by clowns —
And a stranger…
We can not discuss.

Painful moments in our pockets.

I saw groups staring up —
Untethered —
Lost —
Exiles.

They looked small in comparison with
This Curious Refraction.

V.  A Violent Force:

Corybantic priests run —
Amuck through prickly weeds —
Bloody hands full of entrails
Chased by their sacrificial lambs and
Headless corpses —
With empty chest cavities —
Whose names were not happily chosen.

Among the monticules of ashes —
Lie dismembered heads
Mouths stuffed with testicles.

And the stranger —
Bright and Barren —
Grows stronger —
Triumphant.

“With God dead, there remains only history and power.”
— Albert Camus

Pandemic Haiku 2

The Fear Contagion:
Taking Control, Stockpiling,
She feels better now.

“Practice an art for love and the happiness of your life—you will find it outlasts almost everything but breath.”
— Katherine Anne Porter

stop.       gap.

and then there was a stop gap measure…

for the oncoming plague…

“It’s none of their business that you have to learn to write.  Let them think you were born that way.”

— Ernest Hemingway

 Why do you make art?
— It’s a way of living. It’s a way of passing through life.

i.
los minutos pasan
quedan dos

and then there was a multifoliate
a multiplicity, a multivariate, a

multiplication that started
with two

but here in this space, in this
void there is only one

only one that replicates
and that must suffice

ii.
i passed the time
i made some marks

i lived it
monochromatically

with an absence of angst
it was a way
of passing through life

“It’s a way of living. It’s a way of passing through the time.”
— Garry Winogrand

Captain There Are Doubts

The dour captain’s ship caught in an eddy at the strait.  His caravel gyres in the tepid water the flukes held by a god.

His mariners maroon him to certain depths as they cast off in uncertain seas.  Sirens call the sailors, singing: kiss us, kiss us, kiss us, please.

Scylla and Charybdis cavil about the  burnt offerings cooked medium rare, unaware that an albatross drowns in the starless fog with its millstone around its neck.

The Captain sends a mayday, the semaphore signals received by a blind man, hanged by the neck on the mainsail a few feet away.

“A writer should get as much education as possible, but just going to school is not enough; if it were, all owners of doctorates would be inspired writers.”
—Gwendolyn Brooks

5 Gripe Rant

Loud cellphone talkers beget cellphones stalkers.  I’m the woman you fear, dear. I don’t care if you received a merit badge for sailing, I don’t care because I’m just a few steps ahead of you and you can’t escape what I have in store for you tonight.  

Yeah, so who is this Ariel you’re talking to? Does she have what I have, what I can give you? You have no idea I’m here and there will be hell to pay, sir. Who gives a damn that other firms are going to participate?  What are you talking about. You loudmouth.

You know what I’m going to do for you? I’m going to make you a peanut butter and jelly sandwich for dinner — because I can be a hipster too. You’re going to meet at the Haim show? Good luck with that. I’ll show you what a real “Vampire Weekend” is.  

Yes, Ariel, it’s still raining and you can shove that grocery list up your… What? What!  You need cottage cheese and paper plates? Shut up, you witch. 

Oh too bad, so sad, Ariel. He won’t call you later, you won’t see him later, you won’t make the show.

Hey, why are you turning up this street?  Why are you going back downtown? Who are you calling now?  

Stop, turn away, he’s turning and looking this way. Hah! There’s another thing this umbrella is good for, you pig.  No, you really have no idea I’m following, do you?  Well, today was your unlucky day.

Only if you could have put the phone away earlier. That pathetic rant about your boss being a bitch and that women shouldn’t be in the industry, no place in financial… 

Who is that? Kissing another woman. Oh, that’s rich.  Ariel, you’re an idiot.  Pig. Pig. Pig. You’re going to pay.

“Writers will never be happy until they realize that getting published is not a worthy goal. Writing is the best part of being a writer. Getting published gives you moments of happiness, but it’s nothing compared to the extended happiness of writing itself.”
— Carol Fisher Saller

The Mandy Brush

He bent down to rinse the toothpaste out of his mouth and his left side cramped up. The cramp was the most severe pain he’d felt in his life. The sensation seemed like a vise tightening on his left rib cage and reticulating down to his hip.

He fell and the toothbrush lodged in his throat. And what happened next he thought ungodly — the Barry Manilow song “Mandy” began to loop in his head: “Oh, Mandy, You came and you gave without taking, and I need you today, oh Mandy…”

What the fuck have I done, god? Please don’t let me die with this goddamned song in my head…

“…but I sent you away, oh Mandy
well you kissed me and stopped me from shaking…”

Then he remembered his Nietzche: god is dead… god remains dead… and we have killed him…”

“…but I sent you away, oh Mandy
you kissed me and stopped me from shaking
and I need you…”

This is awful, he rasped with his agonal breath.

“Don’t believe that graduate school will somehow make you a writer. Go into the world, get a job that sustains you, and write. If you are writing because you have to, if you are writing when no one is looking and no one cares, then you may indeed be a writer—and you need to cope with that.”
— Alyson Hagy

Wretched Hypnopompia

This morning I woke up with an angry welt on my left temple. I had a bad night’s sleep, that much is obvious. Which is odd as I’ve sleeping rather well lately.

Eris, on the other hand, sleeps poorly. Her snoring is like the rasp of the grim reaper as he inhales your dying breath. Sleep can be wretched in our bed.

And now, I have this welt and a jagged headache to boot.

I wondered for some torpid minutes about my dreams, but I couldn’t recall having dreamt again about falling through sharp crystals in the cold gloriole encrusted sky; or the one about swimming with large pelagic fish, none of them threatening, in the warm sargasso flow; nor was there the recurrence of the dream where I urinate off the edge of Uhuru Peak, only to find myself in bed in a puddle of my own urine — this dream recurs once every decade, and I now I certainly believe that I will drown sometime in the future in a pool of my own piss.

So I’m spending the hour before Eris wakes wondering about last night’s disturbing sleep, and about what awaits us all in the near future — it’s possibly nearer for me than her, but not too distant for any of us in any case. A pandemic? A war? The zombie apocalypse?

I still have some dozen colostomy bags the hospice nurse left here during mother’s decline — to that place where we dissipate before we disappear completely. I use these bags as disposable ice packs. I have one bound around my left temple now from the blow I took last night in my sleep. The headache won’t abate.

Anyway, here I sit unable to think or eat. I can’t eat because I’m having a colonoscopy later today and I’ve been ordered to fast. And I’ve been trying to write something reasonable in my journal, while my head pounds and my stomach groans. It’s damn near impossible.

My psychiatrist suggested that I keep this journal. I don’t think it helps much of anything. She plies me with pills to insure my level mood. She wants me within my “window of tolerance.” She says I have to be less intractable around others.

“If not an altogether more pleasant misanthrope?” I tell her.

But now I’m unable to write anything meaningful because Eris is half awake and wandering about the house. And this headache is cleaving my corpus callosum.

She’s now in the kitchen, filling yet another colostomy bag with ice. She’s complaining that her right wrist hurts and that her hand is swollen. She’s using the remaining gauze tape from the lancing of my thigh pustules to bind the colostomy ice bag to her knuckles.

Oh, what a wretched hypnopompia.

“There is a great deal to be learned from programs, courses, and teachers. But I suggest working equally hard, throughout your life, at learning new things on your own, from whatever sources seem most useful to you.”

— Lydia Davis

On My Sixteenth Birthday

When my estranged father offers to drop acid with me, I start to believe his story.

“I was driving my bus over the I-195 bridge.”

He draws an arc in the air.

“The bus was full of passengers when the acid kicked in.”

He drops his arm, sharp as a T-rule.

“I didn’t think I’d make it across the bridge. The world shifted: the bay now behind me; the bus lifted into the sky — horizontal planes became vertical.”

He floats his right fist off his left forearm.

“We, the bus, everything, drifting off into space.”

He smiles.

“The first time you do it, it should be with someone you trust. Open your hand.”

“You have a lot of people who aren’t good at writing yet telling you what to change about the way that you’re writing… It’s a lot of mediocrity feeding on itself. So you better be radical, and you better hate everyone. Not that I did personally, but that I had to if I was going to protect the thing in me that I knew I wanted to grow.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh